Podcast: University of Minnesota Press
Episode: Nonbinary Jane Austen
Pub date: 2025-09-30

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Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently from how she is classically understood; rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, Washington argues that Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel and envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that supposedly solidifies in the eighteenth century. Here, Washington discusses a politics built on plurality and possibility with Marquis Bey, Christopher Breu, and Alison Sperling.

Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University. He is author of Nonbinary Jane Austen and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.

Marquis Bey is professor of black studies and gender and sexuality and critical theory at Northwestern University. Bey is author of several books including Cistem Failure, Black Trans Feminism, and The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender.

Christopher Breu is author of several books including In Defense of Sex, Insistence of the Material, Hard-Boiled Masculinities, and coeditor of Noir Affect. Breu is professor of English at Illinois State University. 

Alison Sperling is assistant professor of literature, media, and culture at Florida State University, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin.

REFERENCES:

Derrida’s Of Grammatology

Foucault

Trans Femme Futures / Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift

The Anthropocene Unconscious / Mark Bould; Alison Sperling review in Los Angeles Review of Books

The Matrix film

Black on Both Sides / C. Riley Snorton

Fred Moten

Judith Butler

We Are All Nonbinary (essay) / Kadji Amin

Edward Said

Histories of the Transgender Child / Jules Gill-Peterson

S. Pearl Brilmyer / “The Ontology of the Couple” issue of GLQ

A Mercy / Toni Morrison

Sojourner Truth

Nonbinary Jane Austen is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at manifold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening.

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